Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  One drawback to an unconditional enjoyment of Balzac is that every now and again the student of the `Comedie Humaine’ resents the too obvious display of the forces that propel the effect — a lesser phase of the weariness which ensues upon much reading of the mere “human documents” of the Goncourt school of novelists. In the same way, we too often see Browning working up the electrical qualities, so that, when the fulmination comes, we understand “just how it was produced,” and, as illogically as children before a too elaborate conjurer, conclude that there is not so much in this particular poetic feat as in others which, like Herrick’s maids, continually do deceive. To me this is affirmable of “Fifine at the Fair”. The poet seems to know so very well what he is doing. If he did not take the reader so much into his confidence, if he would rely more upon the liberal grace of his earlier verse and less upon the trained subtlety of his athletic intellect, the charm would be the greater. The poem would have a surer duration as one of the author’s greater achievements, if there were more frequent and more prolonged insistence on the note struck in the lines (Section 73) about the hill-stream, infant of mist and dew, falling over the ledge of the fissured cliff to find its fate in smoke below, as it disappears into the deep, “embittered evermore, to make the sea one drop more big thereby:” or in the cloudy splendour of the description of nightfall (Section 106): or in the windy spring freshness of

  ”Hence, when the earth began afresh its life in May,

  And fruit-trees bloomed, and waves would wanton, and the bay

  Ruffle its wealth of weed, and stranger-birds arrive,

  And beasts take each a mate.” . . .

  But its chief fault seems to me to be its lack of that transmutive glow of rhythmic emotion without which no poem can endure. This rhythmic energy is, inherently, a distinct thing from intellectual emotion. Metric music may be alien to the adequate expression of the latter, whereas rhythmic emotion can have no other appropriate issue. Of course, in a sense, all creative art is rhythmic in kind: but here I am speaking only of that creative energy which evolves the germinal idea through the medium of language. The energy of the intellect under creative stimulus may produce lordly issues in prose: but poetry of a high intellectual order can be the outcome only of an intellect fused to white heat, of intellectual emotion on fire — as, in the fine saying of George Meredith, passion is noble strength on fire. Innumerable examples could be taken from any part of the poem, but as it would not be just to select the most obviously defective passages, here are two which are certainly fairly representative of the general level —

  “And I became aware, scarcely the word escaped my lips, that swift ensued in silence and by stealth, and yet with certitude, a formidable change of the amphitheatre which held the Carnival; ALTHOUGH THE HUMAN STIR CONTINUED JUST THE SAME AMID THAT SHIFT OF SCENE.” (No. 105)

  “And where i’ the world is all this wonder, you detail so trippingly, espied? My mirror would reflect a tall, thin, pale, deep-eyed personage, pretty once, it may be, doubtless still loving — a certain grace yet lingers if you will — but all this wonder, where?” (No. 40)

  Here, and in a hundred other such passages, we have the rhythm, if not of the best prose, at least not that of poetry. Will “Fifine” and poems of its kind stand re-reading, re-perusal over and over? That is one of the most definite tests. In the pressure of life can we afford much time to anything but the very best — nay, to the vast mass even of that which closely impinges thereupon?

  For myself, in the instance of “Fifine”, I admit that if re-perusal be controlled by pleasure I am content (always excepting a few scattered noble passages) with the Prologue and Epilogue. A little volume of those Summaries of Browning’s — how stimulating a companion it would be in those hours when the mind would fain breathe a more liberal air!

  As for “Jocoseria”,* it seems to me the poorest of Browning’s works, and I cannot help thinking that ultimately the only gold grain discoverable therein will be “Ixion”, the beautiful penultimate poem beginning —

  ”Never the time and the place

  And the loved one altogether;”

  and the thrush-like overture, closing —

  ”What of the leafage, what of the flower?

  Roses embowering with nought they embower!

  Come then! complete incompletion, O comer,

  Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!

  Breathe but one breath

  Rose-beauty above,

  And all that was death

  Grows life, grows love,

  Grows love!”

  —

  * In a letter to a friend, along with an early copy of this book,

  Browning stated that “the title is taken from the work

  of Melander (`Schwartzmann’), reviewed, by a curious coincidence,

  in the `Blackwood’ of this month. I referred to it

  in a note to `Paracelsus’. The two Hebrew quotations

  (put in to give a grave look to what is mere fun and invention)

  being translated amount to (1) `A Collection of Many Lies’:

  and (2), an old saying, `From Moses to Moses arose none like Moses’ . . . .”

  —

  In 1881 the “Browning Society” was established. It is easy to ridicule any institution of the kind — much easier than to be considerate of other people’s earnest convictions and aims, or to be helpful to their object. There is always a ridiculous side to excessive enthusiasm, particularly obvious to persons incapable of enthusiasm of any kind. With some mistakes, and not a few more or less grotesque absurdities, the members of the various English and American Browning Societies are yet to be congratulated on the good work they have, collectively, accomplished. Their publications are most interesting and suggestive: ultimately they will be invaluable. The members have also done a good work in causing some of Browning’s plays to be produced again on the stage, and in Miss Alma Murray and others have found sympathetic and able exponents of some of the poet’s most attractive `dramatis personae’. There can be no question as to the powerful impetus given by the Society to Browning’s steadily-increasing popularity. Nothing shows his judicious good sense more than the letter he wrote, privately, to Mr. Edmund Yates, at the time of the Society’s foundation.

  == “The Browning Society, I need not say, as well as Browning himself, are fair game for criticism. I had no more to do with the founding it than the babe unborn; and, as Wilkes was no Wilkeite, I am quite other than a Browningite. But I cannot wish harm to a society of, with a few exceptions, names unknown to me, who are busied about my books so disinterestedly. The exaggerations probably come of the fifty-years’-long charge of unintelligibility against my books; such reactions are possible, though I never looked for the beginning of one so soon. That there is a grotesque side to the thing is certain; but I have been surprised and touched by what cannot but have been well intentioned, I think. Anyhow, as I never felt inconvenienced by hard words, you will not expect me to wax bumptious because of undue compliment: so enough of `Browning’, — except that he is yours very truly, `while this machine is to him.’“ ==

  The latter years of the poet were full of varied interest for himself, but present little of particular significance for specification in a monograph so concise as this must perforce be. Every year he went abroad, to France or to Italy, and once or twice on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean.* At home — for many years, at 19 Warwick Crescent, in what some one has called the dreary Mesopotamia of Paddington, and for the last three or four years of his life at 29 De Vere Gardens, Kensington Gore — his avocations were so manifold that it is difficult to understand where he had leisure for his vocation. Everybody wished him to come to dine; and he did his utmost to gratify Everybody. He saw everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large correspondence; read new French, German, and Italian books of mark; read and translated Euripides and Aeschylus; knew all the go
ssip of the literary clubs, salons, and the studios; was a frequenter of afternoon-tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was Browning: the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in poetry since Shakespeare. His personal grace and charm of manner never failed. Whether he was dedicating “Balaustion’s Adventure” in terms of gracious courtesy, or handing a flower from some jar of roses, or lilies, or his favourite daffodils, with a bright smile or merry glance, to the lady of his regard, or when sending a copy of a new book of poetry with an accompanying letter expressed with rare felicity, or when generously prophesying for a young poet the only true success if he will but listen and act upon “the inner voice”, — he was in all these, and in all things, the ideal gentleman. There is so charming and characteristic a touch in the following note to a girl-friend, that I must find room for it: —

  —

  * It was on his first experience of this kind, more than

  a quarter of a century earlier, that he wrote the nobly patriotic lines

  of “Home Thoughts from the Sea”, and that flawless strain of bird-music,

  ”Home Thoughts from Abroad”: then, also, that he composed

  ”How they brought the Good News”. Concerning the last, he wrote, in 1881

  (see `The Academy’, April 2nd), “There is no sort of historical foundation

  about [this poem]. I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel

  off the African coast, after I had been at it long enough to appreciate

  even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse, `York’,

  then in my stable at home. It was written in pencil

  on the fly-leaf of Bartoli’s `Simboli’, I remember.”

  —

  ==

  29 De Vere Gardens, W.,

  6th July 1889.

  My beloved Alma, — I had the honour yesterday of dining with the Shah, whereupon the following dialogue: —

  “Vous e^tes poe”te?”

  “On s’est permis de me le dire quelquefois.”

  “Et vous avez fait des livres?”

  “Trop de livres.”

  “Voulez-vous m’en donner un, afin que je puisse me ressouvenir de vous?”

  “Avec plaisir.”

  I have been accordingly this morning to town, where the thing is procurable, and as I chose a volume of which I judged the binding might take the imperial eye, I said to myself, “Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author’s sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?” So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or no, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend, Robert Browning. ==

  His look was a continual and serene gleam. Lamartine, who remarks this of Bossuet in his youth, adds a phrase which, as observant acquaintances of the poet will agree, might be written of Browning — “His lips quivered often without utterance, as if with the wind of an internal speech.”

  Except for the touching and beautiful letter which he wrote from Asolo about two months before his death, to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, about a young writer to whom the latter wished to draw the poet’s kindly attention — a letter which has a peculiar pathos in the words, “I shall soon depart for Venice, on my way homeward” — except for this letter there is none so well worth repetition here as his last word to the Poet-Laureate. The friendship between these two great poets has in itself the fragrance of genius. The letter was written just before Browning left London.

  ==

  29 De Vere Gardens, W.,

  August 5th, 1889.

  My dear Tennyson, — To-morrow is your birthday — indeed, a memorable one. Let me say I associate myself with the universal pride of our country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year we may have your very self among us — secure that your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after. And for my own part, let me further say, I have loved you dearly. May God bless you and yours.

  At no moment from first to last of my acquaintance with your works, or friendship with yourself, have I had any other feeling, expressed or kept silent, than this which an opportunity allows me to utter — that I am and ever shall be, my dear Tennyson, admiringly and affectionately yours, Robert Browning. ==

  Shortly after this he was at Asolo once more, the little hill-town in the Veneto, which he had visited in his youth, and where he heard again the echo of Pippa’s song —

  ”God’s in His heaven,

  All’s right with the world!”

  Mr. W. W. Story writes to me that he spent three days with the poet at this time, and that the latter seemed, except for a slight asthma, to be as vigorous in mind and body as ever. Thence, later in the autumn, he went to Venice, to join his son and daughter-in-law at the home where he was “to have a corner for his old age,” the beautiful Palazzo Rezzonico, on the Grand Canal. He was never happier, more sanguine, more joyous, than here. He worked for three or four hours each morning, walked daily for about two hours, crossed occasionally to the Lido with his sister, and in the evenings visited friends or went to the opera. But for some time past, his heart — always phenomenally slow in its action, and of late ominously intermittent — had been noticeably weaker. As he suffered no pain and little inconvenience, he paid no particular attention to the matter. Browning had as little fear of death as doubt in God. In a controlling Providence he did indeed profoundly believe. He felt, with Joubert, that “it is not difficult to believe in God, if one does not worry oneself to define Him.”*

  —

  * “Browning’s `orthodoxy’ brought him into many a combat

  with his rationalistic friends, some of whom could hardly believe

  that he took his doctrine seriously. Such was the fact, however;

  indeed, I have heard that he once stopped near an open-air assembly

  which an atheist was haranguing, and, in the freedom of his `incognito’,

  gave strenuous battle to the opinions uttered. To one who had spoken

  of an expected `Judgment Day’ as a superstition, I heard him say:

  `I don’t see that. Why should there not be a settling day in the universe,

  as when a master settles with his workmen at the end of the week?’

  There was something in his tone and manner which suggested his

  dramatic conception of religious ideas and ideals.” — Moncure D. Conway.

  —

  “How should externals satisfy my soul?” was his cry in “Sordello”, and it was the fundamental strain of all his poetry, as the fundamental motive is expressible in

  ” — a loving worm within its sod

  Were diviner than a loveless god

  Amid his worlds” —

  love being with him the golden key wherewith to unlock the world of the universe, of the soul, of all nature. He is as convinced of the two absolute facts of God and Soul as Cardinal Newman in writing of “Two and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.” Most fervently he believes that

  ”Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break . . .

  And set our pulse in tune with moods divine” —

  though, co-equally, in the necessity of “making man sole sponsor of himself.” Ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the bewildering and defiant puzzle of life: seeing in the face of the child the seed of sorrow, “in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night.” Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, “That lost traveller who yearns for home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to which no one responds, resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws himself upon the ground and wants to di
e, and reaches home at last only after all sorts of anxieties and after sweating blood.” No darkness, no tempest, no gloom, long confused his vision of `the ideal dawn’. As the carrier-dove is often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way through smoke and fog and din to her far country home, so he too, however distraught, soon or late soared to untroubled ether. He had that profound inquietude, which the great French critic says `attests a moral nature of a high rank, and a mental nature stamped with the seal of the archangel.’ But, unlike Pascal — who in Sainte-Beuve’s words exposes in the human mind itself two abysses, “on one side an elevation toward God, toward the morally beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the other side an abasement in the direction of evil” — Browning sees, believes in, holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and all, toward an illustrious origin.

  The crowning happiness of a happy life was his death in the city he loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a world-wide fame. The silence to which the most eloquent of us must all one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the Tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us one of his finest utterances.

  It seems but a day or two ago that the present writer heard from the lips of the dead poet a mockery of death’s vanity — a brave assertion of the glory of life. “Death, death! It is this harping on death I despise so much,” he remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech — the inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the listener’s knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all so characteristic of him — “this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death — call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference — is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, `amico mio’, you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. Pshaw! it is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. For myself, I deny death as an end of everything. Never say of me that I am dead!”